


How to Fake a Paradox

by airdeari



Category: 999: Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors - Fandom, Zero Escape (Video Games), Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Big Ole Spoilers for 999 and ztd, F/M, Family Fluff, Heavy Angst, I'll put warnings for suicide in the specific chapter notes, Murder-Suicide, canon compliant if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-21
Updated: 2016-09-06
Packaged: 2018-08-10 04:23:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 11,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7830325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/airdeari/pseuds/airdeari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Junpei can’t lose the Nonary Game. But he can’t not lose the Nonary Game, either. How can those contradictory timelines exist? Why do the others’ memories conflict with the present reality?</p>
<p>In the Nevada test site for a manned mission to Mars, Akane finds the way to complete her illusion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Transporter

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings!  
> Brief depictions of violence and death are scattered throughout the work in Akane's memories. There will be (not too graphic) suicide but it will be confined to a single chapter where I will include a warning in the notes.

Akane could not move for a solid minute through the violent shaking that took hold of her smothered body. She suffocated on smoke that carried the strong stench of blood. Her body was sticky with the red liquid, but as she regained control over each of her quivering limbs, she discovered that none of the blood was hers. There was no pain in her body but for her heart. In her lap was Junpei’s head, his face twisted in horror, attached to a body ripped apart by rapid gunfire.  
  
“Now announcing the current casualties.”  
  
She choked on a sob at the sound of the woman's voice over the speaker. She could see the truth plainly in front of her, but the finality of it sliced her heart in two.  
  
“C-Team: Carlos, Junpei.”  
  
She sucked in a slow breath and engraved the two new X-Passes into her memory.  
  
“SAVE. DOLL.”  
  
Akane shut her eyes and shoved the lifeless bodies off of her. Her hands scraped against the bullet-riddled stone of the fireplace as she crawled out, dragging her knees through the blood of her slain friends. She brought her shaking hands to her face as she uttered, “Horrible… You’re horrible, Junpei.”  
  
She had what she needed. It was time to SHIFT.  
  
But she could not.  
  
Akane lived and breathed the morphogenetic field. Every moment of her life was lived in double, triple, n-tuple times, as she watched timelines branch in the near and distant future. Yet now, she saw nothing, only the hideous corpse of her beloved, blood oozing from a thousand holes in his mangled body. After living for so long with a million different worlds running through her head all at once, everything felt eerily still and silent. She felt terribly, terribly alone.  
  
“Akane Kurashiki.”  
  
Her eyes went wide and her head shot up. This was no longer the voice of the calm woman, but of Zero.

“If you are hearing this, you must still be alive,” he said in his cold, unfeeling tone, masked by modulation. “You have such _selfless_ friends.”  
  
He mocked them for their sacrifice, congratulated her as if her lone survival were a desirable outcome.  
  
“But if you are hearing this message, then you’ve failed in the second part of your plan, haven’t you?”  
  
She was too weak to ball her hands into fists, but her arms shook at her sides. Her breath felt like fire when it seeped out of her lips, as if the air had expanded so greatly from her inner heat that her lungs could no longer contain it.  
  
“Fortunately, I’ve prepared a solution,” he said. “Did you know that there is a way to transmit not only your mind, but your _body_ to another timeline?”  
  
She had no other option but to accept the verbal invitation to a secret room through a hidden passage not indicated on the map of Ward C. Her legs wobbled as she forced them to move despite a cold numbness spreading throughout her body from within her bones. The floor and the walls swirled together when she opened her eyes. All she could see were their bodies, so suddenly and traumatically dead.

The nucleus of the transporter was charged and ready to use, a destination selected on the monitor. “This may be a… circuitous route,” Zero had warned, “but I assure you, it will take you _exactly_ where you need to go.”  
  
With tears cutting lines through the blood on her face, she lay in the input pod and awaited whatever fate lay ahead of her. The river of possibilities had run dry in her mind’s eye.  
  
Three things changed in the transporter room when Akane next saw it. First, there was a small television box sitting on the table. Next to it was the second difference: a black garment with red trim, neatly folded, angled so that its insignia would face Akane when she saw it. Third, of course, was Akane’s location within the room. She had moved from the input to the output pod.

The television screen buzzed with static before the mask of the plague doctor surfaced. “Welcome back, Akane Kurashiki,” said Zero.  
  
She was sick to her stomach with dread to be confined to the single path of Zero’s choosing, blind to even the very next step. Goose bumps crawled across her skin at his greeting. He chose his words carefully, and he had chosen to welcome her back.  
  
“First, a small gift. You may use the change of clothes just beside this monitor,” said Zero. “I imagine you must be covered in the blood of Carlos and Junpei.”  
  
She snatched the black robe up in her trembling fists. With it, she wiped the blood from her face and her hands, but she would not dare pull it over her stained clothes. She could not give him the satisfaction.  
  
“Now.” Zero did not pause for long, as if he had known she would not need the time to don the garment. “I’m sure you are wondering where exactly you are—or, shall I say, _when_.”  
  
It would do no good to speak, even if she could find the strength for it. In terror, she waited.   
  
“It is October. The year is 2027.”  
  
Little by little, she felt her mind float away, up into the greater field of human consciousness.  
  
“You have just recently resumed your existence in this world. The original Akane Kurashiki of this universe is nine years dead.”  
  
Her soul spread thin into the morphogenetic field. It slipped forward and branched into only doomed timelines; it slipped backward and she was cast into flames.  
  
“I assume you know now why you are here.”  
  
She watched her sweater light up. Her skin swelled pink, then turned to a black char. When she opened her mouth to scream, the flames crept down her throat into her lungs and incinerated her from the inside out.  
  
“Now,” said Zero, “it is time for you to sleep.”

After a frantic click of buttons, _19:30_ glowed red on her left wrist. His spiel had eaten up all of her precious few remaining minutes.

“When next you wake, know you will have no memory of the past ninety minutes,” he said. “Or, will you perhaps remember even less than that?”  
  
Her eyes went wide as she felt the prick in her wrist and the burst of something colder than blood flowing into her veins. “Save, doll, save, doll,” she repeated, falling to her knees. If she lost these words, Carlos and Junpei would have died for nothing. Her vision began to blur, her tongue slurred sloppily over the X-Passes. The floor turned this way and that until it came up and hit her face.  
  
“Pleasant dreams.”


	2. Building Q

Akane lay on a tired mattress, smelling the tickle of dust on the sheets draped over her. Lights cut into her eyes when she first tried to open them, eclipsed by a canopy. She had slept in this bed before, but under fresher sheets, and never under the duvet, it was too heavy and had a pattern along its top edge that always scratched her chin.

She opened her eyes again, blocking out the light with her hands. Down past the foot of the bed was the upright piano, its wooden panels opened and removed to allow access to the few remaining strings. On the bench sat a tuning fork and wrench to adjust the notes that had fallen out of tune over the past nine years. Aoi had struggled with this task, she remembered. He lacked the patience to synchronize three adjacent strings to a frequency which the piano had never intended to sound under that key. As Akane had applied a careful ear and gentle hand to the task, he skulked off to a place she was loath to follow. She tended to the task he could not complete while he did the same for her.

The covers crinkled when she folded them back, having laid undisturbed for nearly nine years. She slid off of the bed and tiptoed to the piano, where she played the four-key sequence. Each set of three strings argued about the location of their pitch in a wavering tone on a dulled version of the correct note. With a soft sigh, Akane took her seat on the bench and peered into the body of the piano from above the keys, holding the tuning wrench in her right hand and the fork in her left.

The task was mindless, familiar, and calming: seeing which string lined up with the striking hammer when she depressed a key, twisting the center peg so that its string made a happy chord with the tines of the fork vibrating in her ear, and twisting the neighbor pegs until they resonated as one. She was relieved to be in control again. Had she lost that sense of control recently?  
  
She pressed the heel of her left palm to a suddenly throbbing spot on her forehead. Her wrist itched like something had been on it for a long time, but when she looked at it now, all she saw were four miniscule scratches, just little red spots, in the shape of a square.  
  
Those were the only wounds she could find on her body. But her sweater had splatters of dried blood caked into the stitches.  
  
She sprinted to the vanity on the other side of the room. Aside from a reddish-brown smear under her left eye, her face was clean. Her hair hung in clumps where coagulated blood held strands together. She twisted her body to get a good look at her back. To her surprise, it was pristine but for the dusty gray patch on her skirt, like she had been sitting in ash.  
  
In vain hopes of finding fresh clothes, she yanked on the dresser drawers that had been sealed shut since the first Nonary Game. Her hands trembled; the sight of so much blood was perturbing enough on its own, but there was something deeper that clawed at her heart when she saw it. It was like waking a long time after a nightmare. She knew that something awful had happened in that blank space before she awoke in the princess bed, but remembered nothing of it.  
  
There was a bathroom down the hall. She tried to remember if water flowed through the pipes, but remembered something else. In her memory, after his mishap with the piano, Aoi had stormed off to work on the new feature in the incinerator puzzle. This time, there was no reason he would be there. There would be no puzzle in the incinerator in the timelines about to branch from this universe.  
  
None of the locks were engaged. She walked past grates and doors and simply pulled open the number nine door in the chapel, despite the RED mounted beside it. The bright spines of the necessary pop-up books glowed on the bookshelves in the library. Though there had heretofore been only one mastermind in this timeline, the rooms and doors were close to completion almost a month ahead of schedule.  
  
For a few moments, she hesitated in the door to the workshop. Soft noises echoed off of the steel walls of the small, dark room: the tap of tools against the bench, the little beeps as he tested the watches with spare REDs and DEADs. She ducked under the glowing monitors as she took just enough soft steps into the study to see her brother’s silhouette around the corner, slumped over his desk, engulfed in a deathly aura of despair. She could barely hear his sigh as he slid a small pile of bracelets aside, but it broke her heart.  
  
For fear of startling him should she make a noise, she felt for his consciousness in the morphogenetic field. Though she was at least a year out of practice with matching his signature resonance, it felt familiar to nestle into and glow inside his dark heart. She had kept a hand on this Aoi’s shoulder for nine years, guiding his path in her absence, helping him to create a future that would secure her survival in a different past.  
  
_Aoi,_ she called to him. _Look behind you._

Aoi lifted his head from the hand upon which it leaned. He froze there for a moment, then, so very slowly, he turned around.  
  
After that, he moved so rapidly that she missed most of it behind a single blink. She saw his feet pound on the floor, kicking aside pieces of the mannequin of John—or was it Lucy?—then the air shot out of her lungs from a hundred pounds of force ramming into her. His hands were cold when they first touched her. They shook until they were warm.  
  
Once she made sense of where his arms were as he held her, she slid her hands through his viselike grip to embrace him in return. They continued to resonate at a shared frequency, not because they needed to, not even because they wanted to, but because the identical golden light bursting from their hearts held their consciousnesses together.  
  
“Thank you so much, Aoi,” she whispered, her heart speaking the rest of the gratitude that words could not express. “You’ve worked so hard, all alone, all these years. Thank you.”  
  
In another universe, Akane and Aoi Kurashiki followed the foreseen path to create the second Nonary Game. By retroactive virtue of Akane’s survival nine years ago, there was only one path Junpei was destined to take in this game: the one that would lead to the final puzzle in the incinerator, where he saved Akane’s life. In order to make it that far, however, Junpei needed to explore other paths, paths impossible to traverse in his reality without making a paradox out of Akane. In all of those paths, Akane was already long-dead, yet somehow she acted as a player in the game. In preparation for those paths, Aoi worked alone, following orders from across the morphogenetic field, to create a perfect mirror of the universe in which Akane was alive, awaiting the moment his deceased sister would return to his reality and complete the illusion.

His voice was choked when he spoke aloud, though he tried to mask it. “I didn’t,” he uttered, “I didn’t think you'd really come back.”

“Don't be silly, Aoi, I had to,” Akane said, drawing circles on his back with her fingers. “The future has already been written, and I was in it, so—“  
  
“Shut up. Just shut _up_.”  
  
He resented destiny, not only his own, but the very idea of the future being a finite series of predetermined conclusions. Where Akane loved to wade in the rivers of time, drifting to see what could happen at the end of each branching path, Aoi shut his eyes and clung to the notion of free will. _But you do have free will,_ she had told him. _Your choices determine which of the paths you will follow._  
  
“I _hate_ this,” he spat. “Setting everything up just so you can fucking die again. You know how much I fucking hate this?!”  
  
He burned with the frustration, volatile and so white-hot Akane had to let him go and drift away in the field, though her arms held fast to his physical body. She pressed her cheek against his, only a little surprised to find it wet.  
  
“I’m so sorry, Aoi.”  
  
“It’s not your fault,” he muttered into her shoulder. “It's… it’s because I couldn’t save you.”

“No, it’s _not_ ,” she exhaled, tightening her arms around his hunched back. “I should never have been on that ship. None of us should have. We’ll make them pay, Aoi.”  
  
He did not say anything. Even without sharing thoughts via morphic resonance, Akane knew what he was thinking. The price of true justice was too steep to ever be paid in full.  
  
“What the hell’s on your clothes?” Aoi finally asked, holding her an arm’s length away. “You smell like bl—shit, Akane, what happened? How the hell did you get here?”  
  
She ran her hands along the bloody cables of her skirt. “I’m alright, don’t worry,” she said, because she could not remember the story.  
  
Aoi combed his fingers through a matted lock of her hair and tucked it behind her ear. A thin line glistened on his cheek as his face contorted under the pressure of his grief and relief. More of his weight sank onto her shoulders than she could reliably hold.  
  
“Aoi—”  
  
“Five minutes.”  
  
After a beat, she squeezed his waist and supported him until her arms shook. It was the least she could do to repay him for the support he had given her. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "The other type is where 'multiple histories' exist..."
> 
> I much prefer this style of time travel. The unstable single timeline style portrayed in 999 (and as seen in Back to the Future) feels intellectually beneath the Zero Escape series. That's basically my inspiration to write this.
> 
> the other inspiration was to make my boy aoi kurashiki suffer :^)


	3. Preparations

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oops this was supposed to be the short silly chapter and it ended up being the longest one. no ragrets

Akane looked quite unlike herself in the days to come. Aoi’s shirts draped loosely over her shoulders, turning the smooth curve of her tiny waist into a bland rectangle. Her thighs and hips filled out his skinniest jeans enough to hold them in place despite a billowing waistband. A couple rolls of the cuffs kept her from stepping on the back of the hem, although from the distress to the fabric, it was clear that Aoi took no such precautions when he wore them. There was a hint of mockery in his fond smile as he watched her pick and fuss with his clothes between turns of the tuning wrench in the first class cabin.  
  
“I have belts you could borrow,” he reminded her.  
  
“I tried them,” she reminded him right back. “None of them are small enough.”  
  
“What about the—”  
  
“I’m not wearing the one with the spikes.”  
  
Water did not flow through the pipes in the first class bathroom, but the puzzle required water to extinguish the flames in the fireplace. Aoi shuffled in and out of the room with buckets, filled from the reservoir that would flood D Deck in less than two weeks’ time, to pour water into the plugged tub. He spent more time sitting at the edge of the bed, claiming he needed a rest, than he did carrying water.  
  
“I still think you’d look fine in the shirt if you just tied something around the middle,” he said.  
  
“It would bunch up too much.” She hit the A key and heard a C that warbled with dissonance between the second and third strings. “Your shirts are too big.”  
  
“I have crop tops.”  
  
“My choices there are shirts that say ‘queer’ or some kind of expletive,” she sniffed. She had not yet gotten over her dismay at pulling a small, pastel pink shirt from his belongings, only to turn it around to see written, in a cutesy cursive, simply the word _fuck_ , the rest of the message— _the patriarchy_? _gender norms_? she might never know—snipped away with a pair of scissors.  
  
He laughed. “Yeah, you put the straight in straight-edge. Forget it.”

She held down the A key, tapping the handle of the wrench until the pulsing among the concurrent strings grew slower, then vanished.

“You wanna go shopping before we fly back home?” Aoi asked. “Still have plenty of funds left over. Get you some new clothes. Maybe a special outfit for your murder date with the boyfriend.”  
  
“There’s no way,” she scoffed. “American fashion is so _dull_.”

“Wouldn’t it be better for us to look kind of ordinary so we don’t draw attention to ourselves?” asked Aoi.

“Not me. I’m going to be the cutest girl in the room.”

“How you gonna manage that if we’re taking Light’s kid sister? She’s probably a model by now if she looks anything like him.”

“She looks _nothing_ like him,” sighed Akane, holding her cheeks. “She’s absolutely _adorable_. I’ll never be able to compete with her in American clothes.”

“Okay, but what’ll you wear on the flight? We’re flying public on the way in, remember,” Aoi said. “And then what’re you gonna wear shopping?”

“I’m going to wear a t-shirt and jeans on the flight like any smart, comfortable traveler,” she replied. “And I always steal your clothes when we go to Harajuku, anyway, or else I don’t feel cool enough.”

A bittersweet half-smile always formed on his face when she mentioned life from the opposite side of the river. He liked to hear about those little things, how their relationship had grown through the past nine years, what they had done together, but a part of him was deeply, ravenously jealous of that life he had never lived.

On the morning of their flight, she joked about wearing one of his queer crop tops to the airport so that no one would mistake them for a couple. He pointed out that everyone would just read him as a butch lesbian if she tried that. The seats in coach were too uncomfortable to sleep in despite the length of the flight. Aoi gave her the window seat, since he never spared it a glance except at take-off and landing. Without fail, every time he nodded off, his head would drift to her shoulder. They linked their index fingers together for something to watch between in-flight movies.

“I’ve _seen_ this. There was a video of it on the Internet,” Akane stated, holding one of Aoi’s few buttoned shirts to her chest. “I think you wrap the sleeves around the waist and make a little knot. It makes a dress.”

Aoi heaved a sigh as he hefted a stack of folded and rolled clothes from his suitcase to his half-empty chest of drawers. “Maybe it makes a dress if the boy you stole the shirt from is more than an inch taller than you.”

“No, see, it… it starts here, instead,” she said, opening the shirt to wrap it around her bust. “I guess you don’t button it all the way up so it can fit? But…”

“But you still need a pair of tights”—Aoi grabbed a fold at the back of his shirt and flapped it to reveal the slit riding scandalously high up her thigh—“and in this weather, you’ll need a jacket. A big, bright one if we’re going to Harajuku. None of mine will cut it. You’d be better off wearing something from America.”

“I’ll die of embarrassment if we go to Harajuku.” She held her face in her hands, letting the button-down shirt sag. “Can we wash the outfit I came to this timeline in? That would be okay to go out, I guess.”

“The blood’s not coming all the way out, Akane. We tried twice already.” He sank his chin into her shoulder, looking at her eyes through the reflection in the mirror. “Want me to try and pick something out for you? It might not be your style, but it’ll be Harajuku. Whether we go there or not.”

She did not need to reply; he saw the smile quiver onto her face. The Aoi she had grown up with always helped her with her important outfits. His advice had molded her fashion sense throughout the years.

“Let’s work it out tomorrow morning.” He pressed his pointer fingers to her cheeks and dragged them down to elongate the dark circles under her eyes. “Or whenever you wake up. I’m dead tired and I actually got some sleep on that goddamn flight.”

He kept a bland, but mostly tidy little apartment. His own bed was the only one he had needed until now. Though he first offered to take a blanket on the floor, eventually the siblings settled under the covers together after Akane pointed out that they had already gotten into the practice of it.

In another world, she made Building Q’s first class cabin her bedroom in the last few weeks leading up to the Game. Aoi had let her have the only open luxury suite without putting up a fight, while he took one of the second class cabins in the opposite hall. He had insisted that he hated the décor of first class, that it felt too stuffy. Only by glimpsing this alternate timeline did Akane know he had told her the truth. Even in her absence, Aoi had made his home in second class. This time around, Akane had made hers there as well, in the room across the hall, so that Aoi did not have to walk as far when he woke in the middle of the night from feverish dreams of hearing her cries in the inferno.

As they lay slumped together on the bed, quietly resonating, they shared their opposing memories through the field. While she relived every smoldering second of being reduced to chars and ashes, she transmitted to Aoi again and again the moment she slipped out of the incinerator door and jumped into his arms, squeezing him as tightly as she squeezed him in the present.

In the morning, Aoi dug through his closet to find a silver-studded belt from his junior high days and strapped it around the midsection of his softest shirt, made of a heavy jersey material in a deep shade of plum. What had been a boatneck collar on Aoi’s angular frame skimmed off of Akane’s sloping shoulders. The sleeves bunched at her wrists to hide the scars on her left arm.  
  
Aoi clasped a chain behind her neck as she pulled her hair to the front for brushing. “One of Mom’s,” he said.  
  
A teardrop pendant with the glitter of opal hung from the fine, silver chain. Even in a completely different outfit, he had suggested this necklace last time they prepared for this little excursion.

They did not go to Harajuku, of course. They had not gone to Harajuku last time. With a watchful eye, Akane kept her timelines in perfect parallel.

“You should pick out something, too,” she said as they walked, hand in hand, through the lively streets. They had come to the unspoken decision that they did not care who thought they were a couple.  
  
Aoi scratched behind his ear and glanced into the window of a department store. “Yeah, something more normal,” he mumbled. “Don’t wanna draw attention to myself. I’ll tone it down for the game.”  
  
“No, you won’t.”  
  
He flinched and tried to disguise it with a laugh. “What, you see it in the future?” he asked.  
  
“Aoi, I told you. I’ve already lived through the winning game,” she said. “You wear a ridiculous outfit.”  
  
“Really?”  
  
“Yes, really.” She combed his hair up from his face and held it there. “And you do that thing with your hair that I hate.”  
  
He laughed harder than he had in nine years. His eyebrows showed a hint of confusion, as though he had forgotten what laughing felt like after all this time, the rush of oxygen renewing his strength.  
  
Just like last time, she spotted her dress on a mannequin of a small boutique and stopped mid-stride with a dreamy sigh. Just like last time, Aoi followed her gaze and said, “Well, you’re done, I guess.”  
  
She loved the color that could not rightly be called either blue or purple. She loved the little flower pattern on the trim. She loved the way it followed her curves like it was made for her, tapering into her tiny waist and billowing out for her round hips. The only flaw was in its collar. Though she ordinarily looked stunning in a boatneck sweater, this one somehow did not hit her shoulders in the right way. Aoi noticed it the moment she walked out of the dressing room.  
  
“You could just wear a scarf with it. Maybe like an oversized cowl,” he said, framing his fingers over her to picture it in his mind. “Honestly, I could cut up an old t-shirt and make you something that would work. Only color I’ve got that'd work is black, though.”  
  
“That sounds good,” Akane replied with a coy smile. “Maybe you could make yourself some accessories with any leftover material.”

“Maybe, my ass,” he muttered. “You know exactly what I’m gonna do.”

It was always a surprise how he would react to one of her premonitions. His typical response was a glare or a grumble, sometimes both, but just moments earlier, Akane made him laugh out loud.  
  
In the same store, she picked out two pairs of thigh-high socks, one that she would repurpose as sleeves for her dress to simulate the look of being plucked from a typical autumn day. “There’s nicer patterns than the stripes, aren't there?” Aoi asked, rifling through the rack of stockings.  
  
“Not in black. It’s got to balance with the cowl you’ll make me,” she said. “Oh! Oh, my gosh, one more thing, please, please…”  
  
Her eyes fell on the sparkling hairpiece inside the glass case. The wires would hold her thick hair in a twisted bun and adorn it with jeweled flowers and butterflies.  
  
“What even is that?” Aoi asked, grimacing at the lengthy price tag.  
  
“It goes in my hair. It’s so cute,” she pleaded. “Please? A present for me?”  
  
He rolled his eyes. “That’s not even a request, is it,” he said. “That’s an order from your goddamn destiny.”  
  
“We’ll find something nice for you, too, Aoi,” she promised, and he shushed her with a grimace, because her promise was less a gift and more a prediction.  
  
Despite having more than enough funds to purchase the exquisite jewelry, Aoi was grumpy on principle after dropping a fair sum of cash on Akane’s outfit. His mood changed drastically while Akane perused the aisles of a shoe store for the perfect pair of autumn boots. He came to her, holding a long, gunmetal gray box, eyes wide as he lifted the lid to show her the contents. The tissue paper was pulled back from one of the thick, black boots, with a heavy sole and studded buckles. She heard a silent plea floating into her mind. _Please tell me I can wear these. Please, please, please._  
  
She frowned and held a hand to her chin. “I don’t know,” she murmured. “I like the ones in silver and black better.”  
  
He snapped the lid shut, jaw agape. “There’s ones with silver?!”  
  
Without waiting for an answer, he tore off to where he had found these absolutely outrageous shoes. Akane selected a classic brown boot with a bit of a heel from the shelf before she joined him. He was tying the laces on the predestined boots, turning his ankles with wide-eyed wonder.  
  
“They’re really comfortable, honest,” he said.  
  
“They look good,” she replied.  
  
He gazed at her like a dog looks at a messy child eating a hamburger: knowing that begging could make things quicker and easier, but that, with a little luck, he might get his way no matter what. “You know what would go with this?” he said. “Those stupid pants I used to wear in high school. The big black ones, with all the chains and studs and shit.”  
  
Akane grinned. “That would certainly be a look.”  
  
“I really _should_ wear something outrageous, right?” he said. “It’ll throw them off the trail. No one will think some punk kid could be behind any of this.”

Her grin spread wider. It was the exact reasoning he had used in the adjacent history.  
  
They headed home in a lazy hour of the afternoon, the carriage nearly empty after the train left the downtown area. “For real, I still feel like I’m dreaming,” Aoi said absently, his eyes flicking to the lights zooming past. “I don’t get it. I don’t get how you can be here, when I… when you…”  
  
“I told you I’d find a way.”  
  
“But it’s still…” He trailed off into a sigh as the train screeched to a stop, letting the inertia carry his head to her shoulder. “It just feels so _normal_. Like, yeah, my dead sister suddenly rematerialized after nine years, and we’re just gonna go shopping and hang out. Totally normal.”  
  
“After ten years,” Akane corrected. “I told you, I’m twenty-two. I hope he doesn't notice how much older I look in this timeline…”  
  
“Well, you fake sick in all these timelines to drop him hints about what way to go, right?” Aoi said. “So if you look a little more ragged, it’ll make sense. Even _if_ anyone notices anything.”  
  
She pouted. “You're supposed to tell me I still look perfectly youthful.”  
  
“Hey, I don’t know what you looked like a year ago. Maybe you do look way older now.”  
  
“Aoi!”  
  
In the spaces between conversation, she, too, puzzled over where she had come from. The marks on her wrist where a bracelet might go suggested she had recently taken part in another dangerous game. She had escaped without memory of it, and the longer she lingered in the past, the less she could remember of the future from which she had come. Had she really turned twenty-two? When? What had happened after the second Nonary Game? Was there something she needed to do?  
  
She let the questions stew and simmer while she took care of her present business. Nothing, she reasoned, could be more important than ensuring she would even live to the age of twenty-two. The answers to irrelevant questions could wait.

Her sleep was restless through that night. Every time Aoi felt her slide out of bed with a racing heart, she blamed jetlag. She could not remember the nightmares that had roused her, much like she could not remember what she had been doing before her body returned to Building Q, but they felt like the same batch of empty memories.


	4. Game

“Everyone’s in the rooms,” Aoi reported, rubbing his hands against the knees of his gaudy, faux-goth pants, the wide legs tucked into his new shoes. “Ready to make your dramatic entrance on the staircase?”  
  
Akane pulled her cowl into place and tossed her hair over it. “Ready.”  
  
“Game on.”  
  
He flashed a final smile at her. For the next nine hours, they would be strangers. Akane’s heart sank as he jogged away to take his post at the water pumps. There was an uncomfortably high probability that they would die without getting the chance to say goodbye to one another.  
  
She glanced at her wrist, at the fraudulent bracelet that would ensure she and Aoi—no, Santa—passed through every door together. Her consciousness slipped into another universe, into the future she had left, where she festered in the sense of danger that this bracelet elicited. It was a new danger, a different bracelet, one that punctured her arm, that she could almost remember. She supposed a properly calculated dose of Soporil could have cleaned her memory of the event—she and Aoi had used the same drug for the same purpose on the mountain of a man they would soon call Seven—but when it caused amnesic effects, the memory loss was usually broader, and lasted no longer than a day or two. Three weeks had passed, and Akane thought she remembered less of her history than she had when she first appeared in this timeline.  
  
She had not realized how deeply it would affect her psyche to exist in the world where she had not survived. During the final system tests, she had collapsed in the incinerator, her mind entrenched in the body that had perished in an identical room. A fever gripped her as she struggled to remember whether she had lived or died nine—no, ten years ago. It was psychosomatic, she could force it back if need be, and she forced it back whenever Aoi looked her way, when she needed to creep into apartment 201 and roll an aerosol grenade of Soporil at Junpei’s feet. Nothing that happened in this game could change the fact that this iteration of herself had escaped the Gigantic unscathed.

It still hit her every time something went wrong, even though it was always supposed to go wrong.  
  
“Please,” he said. “Let me go into door five.”  
  
She wobbled on her feet, but forced a smile as Junpei disappeared behind the door with the ugly remains of Teruaki Kubota splattered on the walls. This Junpei had already killed her.   
  
Junpei was essentially the same boy as the one in the parallel Nonary Game, but to Akane, he looked different than he had the first time. It was most jarring when he was withdrawn in idle thought, when his face looked like an empty shell. There was something terrifyingly familiar about this lifeless expression, and something else heartbreakingly nostalgic when he looked at her with unconditional love in his eyes.  
  
“Don’t tell Junpei,” she said later, breathless, as she sank against the wall outside the unlocked second-class cabins. “I don’t want him to worry. I'll be okay. Please, don’t…”  
  
Lotus doted on her like an experienced mother: just enough to make sure she was alright, and nothing more. Santa set himself up as asocial, yet sympathetic, when he mumbled, “You, uh, need anything?” every time he passed her, shrugging with indifference when she shook her head.  
  
She fled to alternate worlds in the morphogenetic field to soothe her temperature. Her heart ached to be with Junpei, the Junpei who was still full of hope, with a desperation as though she knew she would never see him like this again. Her future, or her past, whichever she should call it, had started to take form as danger and epiphany strengthened her access to the morphic fieldset. She plucked her own memories from the great human subconscious: the Nevada test site, the drug-inducing bracelets, the three teams. A glimpse into the murky waters of the field told her that Junpei had been there, but her heart said he had not. She would have remembered seeing his glowing smile and the warmth in his eyes. That look on his face awakened the long-dormant butterflies in her stomach when they at last reunited in the large hospital room.

Aoi broke her heart when Santa told his tale to June and Junpei on the stairs of the steam engine room. He only needed to plant the seed of a greater story, to just mention that he had a little sister who died, but his broken heart got the better of him. All of his trembling hurt came out in ways only Akane could read when he spoke of the Christmases she cherished, Christmases that were his last happy memories of her in this timeline. She held back her tears—tears would be too drastic, but June was soft and sympathetic enough to twist her face with sorrow after hearing any stranger’s sob story. Junpei suspected nothing. While he glanced away uncomfortably, Aoi glared at Akane. In less than a second, he emoted all of the pent-up bitterness from being resigned to this destiny. Then his face softened and he glanced back to his photo. There was not much bitterness, not towards her.  
  
Santa did something else differently than planned in the large hospital room. Once Ace had made his dramatic exit with Lotus and Kubota's bracelet, June was supposed to collapse with fever, but tell Junpei, Santa, and Seven to go on without her. Although Junpei would insist on staying behind with her, Santa would urge him to go with Seven. He would say a line about how they did not have time to argue. They needed the team with brains and brawn to stop Ace. Compared to Junpei, who could follow a string of hazy clues to catch a murderer, and Seven, a veritable mountain, Santa was neither.  
  
Instead, Akane felt Santa’s—no, Aoi’s—arms around her the moment a memory of fire licked her neck and brought her to her knees. “Hey!” he shouted. “June, what happened?! Are you alright?!”  
  
His embrace was so secure that she never even hit the ground. Despite all his previous efforts of self-preservation, he passed up his only chance to escape for a girl he had evidently never met. Junpei and Seven did not seem to notice the drastic shift in Santa’s character. Perhaps Santa's more detailed, personal story of his sister’s death had led Junpei to believe that he at least saw some of his sister in Akane. Perhaps Junpei understood the urgency of the situation, that there was no time for sentimentality or arguing. This was, after all, the Junpei who had chosen not to accompany June through the first set of numbered doors. Perhaps this Junpei did not love her deeply enough, and that was why he could not save her in this universe.  
  
Aoi scarcely waited for the clatter of frantic footsteps to fade into echoes in the hallway before he scooped Akane into his arms and laid her on a cot, holding a hand to her forehead. “That was suspicious, Aoi,” she sighed, her eyes fluttering closed.  
  
“I don’t care. You’re not faking this fever, are you?”  
  
She swallowed through her dry throat. “It’s just… it’s just the memory,” she said. “Morphic resonance with… my past self from this timeline. I’m not sick, I promise.”  
  
“It doesn’t matter if you’re sick. Your temperature’s so high, it’s gonna fry your brain,” he uttered. “ _Fuck_ him. Fuck him and his shitty doll for making you go back down there. Fuck him for not being able to fucking save you in one try.”  
  
His voice was breaking, but Akane had lost track of it. “Doll,” she repeated, feeling the word out with a curious tongue. “Save. Doll…”  
  
“Akane?”  
  
Her eyes shot open. She remembered the cool, electronic voice of a woman saying those words. She remembered whose blood was splattered on her sweater dress. She remembered _everything_.  
  
“Aoi,” she breathed. “I know how I got here. And I… I know where I have to go next.”  



	5. SHIFT

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the warnings for suicide and major character death are because of this chapter. it's kind of heavy. take care of yourselves, make sure you're in an ok mental place to read it.

Clover was already gone. Only an empty husk of her remained in the first class cabin, leaking blood out of the hole that Ace had torn through her ribcage. In that moment, after hours of deadly puzzles, after losing the one she loved most, she escaped. She fled back to the start, desperately looking for a way to save herself, to save her brother. This was the beginning of the most essential part of Akane’s plan to instill in Junpei a sense of urgency: everyone had to believe that Akane Kurashiki had died in the incinerator nine years ago.  
  
Alternate memories are a tricky thing to recover once a consciousness jumps to a new timeline, especially if one is not experienced with SHIFTing. Upon resurfacing in a new spot in the river of time, a novice SHIFTer immerses themself in the memories flooding towards them, memories that rush in to replace those from the timeline they have just left. A traumatic memory nine years old, however, does not budge so easily, not when the rest of the world stands almost exactly the same, and the only contradiction conceals herself behind blindness, face-blindness, amnesia, and the codename June. To all appearances, it would look as though, rather than jumping to an alternate timeline, they had simply restarted in the same one.  
  
By the time the metal door of the large hospital room clanged open, Akane could stand again, though her vision swam and blurred. “They’re all in the incinerator, door’s open, countdown's started. About five minutes to go,” Aoi reported. “So… Light takes him down here?”  
  
Akane shook with a sudden sob of sympathy. She remembered every second of her incineration, of how very long it took to die when blasted by flames on all sides. There was a blind spot in her vision of this timeline, when the door closed with Junpei on one side and the dying man called Snake on the other. She could only hold back her tears if she placated herself with the possibility that Light would give into death from the six bullets in his chest before the room ignited. She had placated Aoi with the same possibility, presented falsely as fact.  
  
“Is one person really enough resonance for a non-esper to SHIFT?” Aoi asked. “I mean, I get how Seven’s gonna work, there’s a bunch of people for him to ride with. But with… with _him_.”  
  
He could not say Hongou’s name without feeling sick, nor would he deign to use his codename in private. In every timeline, Hongou was a vile criminal, more demon than man, but to Aoi, Hongou was also the remorseless murderer of his little sister.

On the other hand, Akane, having already claimed her victory over the corrupt CEO of Cradle Pharmaceuticals in her own timeline, no longer had a reason to fear him. “Hongou doesn't need to SHIFT,” she said. “He’s already forgotten about me. Whether I lived or died never mattered to him. So whether he SHIFTs or not to escape the incinerator doesn't matter to me.” She flashed a heartless smile. “Though, since he’s going to survive the next game, it’d be nice if he brought some _painful_ memories with him.”  
  
Aoi grinned. He had learned over the past few weeks that, behind his sister’s sweetness, she had learned to be incredibly cold. That truth had destroyed Junpei, but Aoi _loved_ it, celebrated it, grabbed her shoulder and gave her a playful shake.  
  
“Ready to seal this suicide pact?” he asked. “Water flow starts in fifteen. We’ll trick everybody into hiding in the elevator and flood it, and then we’ll SHIFT to the start of the real timeline.”  
  
Akane’s face fell. Their discussions about the end of this timeline had always been terse. Neither particularly wanted to talk for long about the circumstances of the other’s death. She thought Aoi had understood that what he was suggesting was impossible, at least for her.  
  
“Wait,” she said. “Can we… coordinate something else?”  
  
Now Aoi’s face turned bleak. “What?” he asked. “Why?”  
  
“I want to say something to Junpei,” she said, then shook her head. “I… _need_ to say something.”  
  
There was nothing at all she needed to say, not in the way she made Aoi think she meant. She had no important, fated statement to make, no hints to guide him on his journey through the next timeline. The only thing she wanted was the chance to say her goodbyes.  
  
“He’s going to leave Seven and Lotus to come get us,” she said. “As soon as he’s gone, you go to those two and tell them we don’t have any time left. I don’t know what happens to you after that, but your digital root _is_ nine. Worst case, if they try to escape through door q, lock yourselves in the incinerator. But they’ll probably want to wait for me and Jumpy and find another way out of here, and then you'll go with the elevator plan.”

Color drained from his face as he listened to her calculate the possibilities that lay ahead. “But Seven needs to be near the espers,” he said. “He’s only got me if you two leave. That's not enough, right?”  
  
“We _will_ be close by,” she said. “Jumpy will find me in the chapel. You’ll be in the Saturn elevators or the incinerator.”  
  
One of his hands was already on her shoulder; he moved his other hand to mirror the first. For a long, heart-rending moment, he just stared into his sister’s eyes, willing his fate to change. But it was already written.  
  
“Okay,” he finally sighed. “Just… stay connected with me, alright? We’ve gotta coordinate times and all.”

He had started to turn away when a shiver ran down Akane’s spine and jerked her legs into motion. She barreled into Aoi’s thin chest, pressing her cheek against his shoulder as she held him tightly. The soft, warm weight of his arms fell to her back.

_C’mon, we’ll be fine,_ Aoi murmured in her head, a smile in his voice and on his face. _Let’s get moving. No time to waste._

She nodded numbly. It took another moment for her to let go.

From one of his massive pockets, he pulled a switchblade, which he pressed into her hand. She dropped it to the ground in the chapel as soon as he was out of sight, heading towards the incinerator. Then she herself dropped to the ground.  
  
Because of her schemes, Light had died in there. Light Field, the boy who had held everyone together in that first deadly game, who had calmed the fearful with a comforting murmur or a little fairy tale, might carry with him, for the rest of his days, the same searing heat that tainted Akane’s nightmares. As if punishing her, the flames climbed through the morphogenetic field to scorch her again, lapping at her flesh, tearing it from her bones in charred hunks that shriveled into ash.  
  
Aoi’s voice cut through the roar of fire. _Lured Seven and Lotus into the “watertight” elevator,_ he reported. _Ready for the flood._  
  
As she had once died by fire, so would her brother by water. He would bring this memory of his death to the next life to plague his own dreams for as long as he lived.  
  
_Aoi,_ she said warily, _do you know what happens when you SHIFT?_  
  
There was a confused pause. _Your mind jumps to another point on the timeline._  
  
_What happens to the other you that was on that point before you SHIFTed in?_ she asked.  
  
He did not answer for a while, though Akane knew he was smart enough to figure it out on his own.  
  
_Your consciousnesses swap places,_ she said when he would not. _You take your place in a safe body, leaving your other self to die where you left your doomed body._  
  
_You’re trying to tell me I’m gonna kill the Aoi Kurashiki whose sister lived,_ he growled. _You know what, Akane? Fuck him. He had nine years of happiness I’ll never have. I deserve this more than him._  
  
_That’s not all I’m saying, Aoi,_ she said softly.  
  
His rage quieted, but his heart was still volatile. He was afraid.  
  
_I’ve already told you that I’ve experienced the Nonary Game where Junpei saves me,_ she said. _If I were to SHIFT back there with you, I would be trapping myself into an eternal loop, where I win the game, then come back to lose the game, only to SHIFT back and win the game again, and so on._

She heaved a sigh.

_I… can’t go with you, Aoi._  
  
A cry came through the field, an inhuman noise, not a noise at all, like a crash and a punch and a wave.  
  
_I’m gonna fucking SHIFT all the way back,_ he roared. _I’m gonna SHIFT to the minute you walked out of the incinerator and lived, goddammit! I came all this way for you, and you… you…!_  
  
_You can’t do that, Aoi. You have to go with Junpei so you can bring Seven to the start of the true game, or it’ll all have been for nothing._  
  
When she heard the sound of shuffling footsteps nearing the chapel, she choked back her sobs. She let the tears form, however; the watery eyes and the blotchy face would be part of the illusion of her strange fever.  
  
_Me and Junpei both,_ he muttered when the door to the chapel opened. _Chasing after a girl we never really knew, only to find out we were nothing but pawns in her game._  
  
Junpei called her Kanny for the first time all night. After that, she could barely hear anything he said. She was seeing something else in his eyes, near-red in the warm light of the chapel. She saw the boy from next year, the one with a hardened heart and a battered soul, the one she had destroyed.  
  
“Jumpy,” she said, “I’m sorry. I… I might not make it.”  
  
_Water’s coming in, and Seven can’t force the door open. Everything’s going like it’s supposed to,_ said Aoi. _Get ready to kill your shitty boyfriend who can’t fucking save your life without needing half a dozen do-overs._  
  
Aoi had given her the knife to trigger Junpei’s SHIFT. Akane could not bring herself to harm him, not after all he had done for her—would do for her—to protect her, to save her life.  
  
“Thank you, Jumpy,” she breathed. “Thank you so much… for everything.”  
  
She had a less cruel fate in mind, one that would trigger the same sense of danger needed to urge his mind from his doomed body, but that would not cause him a moment of pain. At this moment, he was still so pure, so innocent. He did not yet know that all of this hardship was her fault, and that was the loveliest thing about coming back to the Nonary Game.  
  
“I was… really happy… to see you again, Jumpy.”  
  
This Junpei. Her Jumpy. She might never see him again.  
  
“Really… happy…”  
  
He shouted frantic, impossible promises to save them both after her eyes slid shut.  
  
_Elevator’s about half-full now, but we’re all treading water,_ said Aoi. _Kill a little more time. I’ll let you know when there’s no more air._  
  
As a hazy, wishful thought, she wondered if anything she said now could preserve Junpei's fragile heart. There was no purpose for saying what she said next, except that she found herself wanting to say it. She wanted to make sure he knew.  
  
“Jumpy, did you know,” she could barely say through the thick layer of ash building in her throat, “you… meant a lot to me… when we were kids.”  
  
Her words were not protecting his heart, but breaking it. Despite the tears welling up in his eyes, her heart burned—her whole body was burning—to say what she had always wanted to say, to express the feelings that could never amount to anything in their future, not in the future where she had hurt him so badly.  
  
“I’ve liked you… for a long time, Junpei,” she whispered. “A really… long… time…”  
  
_Okay, get ready,_ Aoi warned. _It’s… it’s almost over. We’re right at the ceiling. There’s inches left._  
  
His fear was palpable, a quick, hammering heartbeat pounding ripples into the morphogenetic field.  
  
She almost forgot about the recording she had set to go off at this moment. Zero’s voice—her own voice, fed through a modulator that pitched it down two octaves—rang out in the air to announce the end of the game. Junpei shouted at the speaker, tricked into thinking it was a live broadcast by the way the voice answered the questions she already knew he would ask.  
  
_I can’t breathe, Akane,_ came a whimper across the field.  
  
She almost missed her cue to disappear when the door to the chapel shut itself automatically. Only when Junpei’s hands fell away, when he went to check the hallway outside for the true Zero, did she remember to scamper underneath the pews, pulling her prepared gas mask to her face. She held her breath, not to prevent Junpei from hearing the sound of air wheezing through the ventilator, but because she was entrenched in Aoi, engulfed in his terror.  
  
_Akane, help me, please,_ he cried. _This hurts so much. I can’t breathe. I…_

Water rolled into her mouth and blocked her breath. She felt it sloshing into her stomach as she wanted to cough away the tickle in her throat, only to feel the water rush into her airways. Every blood vessel, every alveolus, every inch of tissue in her lungs shrieked in agony.

_I don’t want to do this anymore._  
  
With trembling hands, she pulled back the lock on the Soporil canister and rolled it away from her. Tears dripped onto the lenses of her gas mask, swirling in circles when her weak body gave into violent shudders. Her arms came up over her head as she lay under the pews, feeling phantom water press into her body at the same time she felt phantom fire disintegrate it.  
  
_Please just come with me. Please,_ he begged. _I love you, Akane._  
  
_I’ll be there, Aoi,_ she promised, biting through her lip to keep from screaming. _I love you, too._  
  
Junpei clattered to the floor in the chapel at the same moment that Aoi Kurashiki disappeared from the morphogenetic field. The game was over. She had lost.  
  
Aoi’s knife beckoned her from the floor. Her arms felt limp by her sides, perhaps too weak to plunge a blade into her own heart, though her desire for death might have enabled her to overcome that weakness. Dying in that easy way, however, would not be enough to atone for what she had done to her own brother, to everyone trapped in that elevator.  
  
Pools of murky water leaked under the chapel doors. The Kurashikis had always intended to flood the lower decks after the nine-hour time limit. If anyone intended to murder their way through the game, door q would confound them and bind them to the bottom of the ship, while the water from D Deck was drained into the cavern below to punish them. No one in these doomed timelines would ever escape. Even if authorities ever found their way to Building Q, only a pile of silent corpses would greet them, all stories obscured. This desolate end was the punishment Akane deserved.  
  
She had divined her destination. The adjacent timeline, on December 31, 2028, when she, Carlos, and a shattered Junpei got their lucky dice roll in the recreation room in Ward C of the shelter in which the Decision Game took place. “Save,” she murmured as she shuffled through the flooding halls. “Doll.”  
  
She trudged through water up to her shins to the sound of rushing waves, stopping only when she saw the wall of water racing towards her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [if you need a pick-me-up here is all the tumblr posts i have reblogged with the tag "good dog"](http://airdeari.tumblr.com/tagged/good-dog)  
>  the last chapter of this is going to be sluggish to arrive because I don't think it flows right yet so I'm going to work some major revisions (but I'm also trying to finish an accidentally colossal "one shot" fic about my two favorite boys for 999 week which I have heard is a thing). an optimistic goal is to have the final chapter done for June's day on 9/6 but who knows? anyway, thanks for reading so far. see you soon.


	6. Ring

What little of Building Q that Akane could see in the passenger side mirror behind the cloud of dust that Aoi left in their wake was obscured further by the tears filling her eyes. She had not said a word since the successful conclusion of their Nonary Game, had tried to keep her little sobs quiet, but Aoi knew her too well. After he started the car, he took her hand from her lap and rested it under his on the gearshift. The roar of the engine covered her shaky breaths and sniffs. Aoi stroked her hand with his thumb.

“You still crying?” he asked after a while.

Her knuckles turned white on the gearshift. “I hurt him so much,” she choked. “I used him.”

“It’s been a year, Akane. Get a grip.”

That was not what he was supposed to say next.

Her dress was cream, not periwinkle. His hair lay flat, its little length tucked behind his ear to keep it out of his eyes as he stared down the road ahead.

“This is a dream,” Akane realized.

“Yep.”

Aoi lifted his hand from the gearshift to tap on the clock in the center console. The longer Akane stared at it, the less it looked like a real number, let alone a valid time of day.

“I’m gonna stop driving.” Aoi moved his foot back from the accelerator pedal, taking hold of Akane’s hand and the gearshift. “I hate driving dreams. I always crash when you’re in them.”

As the car naturally decelerated, he rocked the gears back under her hand: fifth, fourth, third.

“Is this a resonant dream?” she asked. “Are you just part of my imagination, or are you the real Aoi?”

“Depends.” They dropped to second gear. He touched the brakes. “What’s the ‘real’ Aoi to you?”

After the car came to a stop and he rolled the gearshift into neutral territory, his hand left hers to pull up the emergency brake and turn the key. Everything went quiet. He faced forward with an intense stare, watching the desert fade into nothingness now that neither of them believed in it.

“You said it's been a year. So you’re coming to me from 2028,” she stated.

“That’s a coincidence. I meant it’s been a year for you.” Without sparing her a glance, he gestured at her with a limp hand. “You’re dreaming about this car ride while wearing that dress, so you just lost the Nonary Game.”

He had recalled more phantom memories from the parallel branch of their lives during the past year than in any of the nine years preceding. If everything Akane had just been through was real, those memories were not phantom, but genuine.

“All this time, you’ve been him,” she uttered. “The other Aoi. The one whose sister died.”

Aoi closed his eyes for what seemed like the first time in the dream, and shrugged. “It’s hard to say,” he said. “Everything he lived for those nine years, it all came back to me once I SHIFTed. It’s like I lived both lives. Like we’re combined into one person now.”

“But the Aoi I _really_ grew up with, he’s—”

“Dead. Died as soon as our game began.” Aoi’s stare turned darker as his lips curled into a frown. “C’mon, Akane, you always do this. Always get all worked up over your alternate selves dying now that you know how SHIFTing really works. One of you’s gonna die in the end, so it might as well be the one you don’t know about.”

She sighed, twice, but it brought no relief to her sickened stomach. Aoi had been distant during the true iteration of the Nonary Game. She had suspected there was something more to it than an act put on for the game, but she never could have guessed this truth until now. He had shown her the cold shoulder out of resentment that the Akane beside him had not been the one who promised she would be there.

“So.” Aoi slouched in his seat, folding his arms across his chest. He still kept his eyes forward; not once had he looked at Akane. “Where did you have to go to so bad after that?”

She sighed again, slower and deeper, to center herself. “I’m on my way there now,” she said. “The Dcom experiment. Junpei’s waiting for me.”

“Junpei, huh,” Aoi muttered. “Well, looks to me like you’re sleeping, Akane.”

He turned to face her for the first time. To her surprise, his blue eyes were twinkling with fondness over a half-smile.

“Why don’t you wake up?” he asked.

“Because I…”

Everything began to glow, as if illuminated by burning daylight, as her waking body had opened its eyes.

“I want to—I _need_ to apologize, Aoi,” she cried, reaching out for him as he drifted further away. “For everything I put you through, I—I’m so s—”

“Don't. It wasn't your fault,” he cut in. “You did what you had to do. I’m not mad anymore.”

She felt the warmth of his hand on hers, giving her a squeeze before he let her fingers slip away.

“Thank you so much,” she called. “I love you, Aoi.”

“Love you, too, Akane.”

* * *

“Junpei, do you think… she didn’t make the SHIFT?”  
  
“If she didn’t make the SHIFT, she’d still be awake right now,” snapped Junpei. “She just hasn’t gotten up yet for… whatever reason. Come on, Akane…”  
  
She felt a rough shove on her shoulder and swatted at it on reflex.  
  
“Hey!” Carlos cast a shadow over her closed eyes as he loomed over her. “Akane! Are you alright? Did you get it?”  
  
She opened her eyes. There was Carlos, of course, grinning with anticipation, and there was Junpei. He was thinner, paler, his eyes darker and more tired, his hair limper and shaggier, his forehead marred by a lingering crease between his eyebrows. A single year had done all of this to his body.  
  
She had not broken him. He was breaking himself because of her. He had just done so again in the neighbor timeline, mutilating his body in gunfire to protect her.  
  
In a hot burst of anger, she shoved both of her teammates away as she stomped to her feet. “What in the world were you thinking?!” she screamed, screamed like she had wanted to when she felt her brother begging for his life seconds before his death.

They stepped back in shock. Where Carlos looked ready to apologize without knowing what he was apologizing for, Junpei’s face creased with reciprocal anger.

“What is your problem?!” he shouted back. “Look, the three of us SHIFTed just fine, so what's the big deal?”

She could feel her stare burning livid as he spoke. It mattered little to her that, contrary to Junpei's understanding, she had _not_ SHIFTed just fine. The issue was that neither had he, nor had Carlos. In the wake of his depression, Junpei had pulled an innocent victim into his whirlpool of self-destruction. Akane's lips trembled too fiercely to say anything but, “It’s not okay.”  
  
With a sheepish half-smile and without a hint of regret for the torture to which he had just subjected himself, Carlos said, “Uh, we did get seven X-Passes, at least.”

“Not you, too, Carlos,” she moaned. “I can't believe you!”

He and Junpei exchanged a look, each silently asking the other if he knew what Akane was so mad about, as if they thought nothing of their excruciating sacrifice. She did not care that she had taken such a painful path to return to the Decision Game; to resent them for her own failings was immature. What she resented was that Junpei’s strategy placed her above everyone else, without a second thought to his, or even Carlos’s, wellbeing.

“You always were like that, weren’t you, Junpei,” she said in a shaking voice.

Words spilled out of her mouth about the rabbits from sixth grade before she knew what she was saying. She remembered his dumb grin, opening under a black eye and a swelling cheek, missing a tooth, as he fancied himself a hero. He had been her hero—he was still her hero—but now his heroics scared her more than ever.

“Even the SHIFTing,” she said. For a moment, she could not go on.

She looked into Junpei’s eyes. They were the same color as when she had last seen them in the chapel in Building Q, but so much colder, so detached, so dead. She wondered if he would have the heart left to care if she told him what she had been through to get here, if he could no longer care about himself.

“It’s… okay. Because it worked,” she said hesitantly, staring at the ground. “But… what if I was left behind there?”

He scratched his head, rolling his eyes to the side. “Well, I, uh, I figured you could escape alone, then, or,” he stammered, “or something.”

The thought of escaping had never even occurred to her as she stood helpless in front of their bodies in the rec room, but that was how Junpei expected her to see the world. To him, she was the cunning, ruthless orchestrator of the second Nonary Game. She was Zero. An opportunist, who would see the inability to SHIFT as a chance to save her own skin.

“But that way of thinking is completely wrong!” Her voice broke in the middle of her sentence. “Being the sole survivor does not make me happy.”

She thought of the last words she had told him in Building Q, in that alternate history. There was no doubt that those memories had slipped from his mind as soon as he restarted the game. Still shaking with frustration, she could not bring herself to say it again, not the way she had told him back then. The words would not sound genuine, even if the feelings were.

“There’s no point in living,” she whispered, “once you lose the one you care about the most.”

She lifted her head, hoping to see something, anything, in Junpei’s eyes. Some small shred of his humanity, some part of him that remembered who she really was and who he used to be, despite all the games.

And there it was.

The coldness in his features melted at her words. His eyes were wide, and they were alive again, burning bright, feeling. He trailed off after he said her name, unable find the words to follow it. It all brought back those butterflies, flitting about in vain for a romance that could never be.

Though Akane heard footsteps retreating, no doubt Carlos’s, she saw nothing more. The tears were spilling out of her eyes, tears from a story she did not have the strength to tell, tears for the death of a childhood friendship. She had changed. Junpei had changed. She had tried to reach out, but after what she had done to him, he could never trust her with his precious heart again.

As she began to shake with sobs, she heard him say a plaintive, “I’m sorry.”

Those were the words she should have been saying to him.

“I… I never meant to ever cause you pain like that.”

Words she should have been saying to him, yet he was saying them to her. She was angry, yes, but that did not change what little right she had to make him apologize.

When she finally lifted her tearstained face from her hands, Junpei was holding something out to her, something small. Through the blur of the tears, she could not even see it.

“What’s that?” she asked in a small voice.  
  
“Well, remember back in elementary school…”  
  
She blinked away the tears. Once the object came into focus, Junpei’s words fell away.  
  
He took her hand. He slid it onto her finger. When she looked up, his smile was not the same as it had been a year ago, and his eyes were dark, but he was still Junpei. And he still loved her, after all this time.  
  
She fell into his strong and sure arms, her sobs returning anew. For a while, she could say nothing but his name and a choked thank you that felt meaningless next to the gift of his trust.

And then she noticed which hand he had put the ring on.  
  
He was still Junpei.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> september 6 i post the 6th chapter out of 6 about our pal 6. im really poetic this 999 week. hope you enjoyed the chapter because I had to work real hard to double-check stuff about how to decelerate a car with a manual transmission. just kidding. about the working hard. i did have to research that though.
> 
> anyway! that's the end of this little addendum. it feels more like a thought experiment than a work of fiction and the prose kind of came out stale at points because of that, but I hope you liked it anyway. thanks for reading.


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